Discount pricing on Kindle copies of your printed books is coming next month

Amazon is launching an interesting, and possibly redundant, program next month called Kindle Matchbook. The way the program will work is when you buy a "real" printed book, you can grab the Kindle copy at a pretty deep discount or get it free.

The program will also be backwards compatible, meaning books that qualify purchased all the way back to 1995 (when Amazon first started selling books) are eligible.

The only real bottleneck at this point is the limited list of titles. Right now, it looks like thousands of books will be eligible, which means that most aren't. Amazon will have to work out the necessary deals with publishers to get more on board with the program, which really only puts more money in the distributors and sellers pockets.

There are a couple books I own in the list shown on the source link page, but the problem is I bought them in digital form. I buy a lot of books, but I rarely buy physical copies because eBooks (ironically, most are Kindle books from Amazon themselves) are easier to purchase, and keeping track of a ton of digital books is simpler than maintaining a big library of bound, printed books.

Will this get you to start buying more printed books? Let us know in the comments.

This isn't redundant. Some publishers seem to be slow to create Kindle versions of their books, and this can help. I'm a student, so I buy lots of books from Amazon. Say I buy a heavy textbook now, and I want to look back at it a year from now. If the publisher has gotten its act together by then, I could buy the Kindle edition for a reduced or free price and save my back the trouble of carrying it around. Amazon sends more and more like a student's best friend.

It'll be interesting to see how long it takes to find print books that are eligble where the price is lower than buying just the ebook. That may be the only time I buy print. This already happens all the time with Autorip.
It'll also be interesting how the ownership rights pan out.

In this case, because you've paid the cost of producing the book and author royalties in the physical book cost. The cost of the ebook is negligible comparatively. If you throw in a "free"* copy of the ebook with the physical book it could drive physical book sales. The same practice is already done in music and movies.

* let's be honest, nothing is free, the cost of the ebook would be built in to the price.

I think as I get older I want less clutter. eBooks are a nice way to read and have something that's very portable and not have to store the book somewhere when done. I have plenty of paper books I don't know what to do with though I can't part with them. So I don't see myself doing this unless it becomes cheaper to buy the physical book and get a free kindle download. Then I guess I'd sell the physical book to a used books store in town.

I could have used this program a couple of years back. I've been slowly moving my dead-tree library over to digital form and am down to my last 50 books (22 of which are not available on Kindle). Just this past weekend, I bought a boat load of those books because the prices dropped to reasonable levels (I guess that couldn't have had anything to do with those ebook price-fixing settlements and Apple being found guilty -- just because there was almost no price movement for the preceding 2 years (and where the heck are our rebates for those settlements?)).

How do they validate the physical copy? If I buy one used for $1, redeem the discounted offer, then give it to a friend, can they redeem it?

I going to guess it's tied to your past physical copy purchases through Amazon.com and limited to once per book, right? (not that I thought it would be multiple redemptions, just trying to understand the validation process)

Ironically, it might actually make me buy more Amazon books. I still like to turn the page and buy most of my things from the local Books-A-Million. I do own some Ebooks and have even found myself recently, getting Ebook versions of books I am reading so I can keep it on my phone and take it with me easier than carrying the printed edition. Keeping track of the printed page and electronic page isn't as hard as I once though it to be. Usually they are only off by 2-5 pages between them.